While I made an alt character, I have actually been pretty consistently playing my Astrologer with his sorcery build. I struggled a bit to find the Smithing Shards I needed to get his weapon upgraded to +3, and I may... have gotten a little carried away - my Magic Short Sword is now a +8 (I had a lot of the later materials). But, I finished the Raya Lucaria Crystal Tunnel mini-dungeon, which gives you the Bell Bearing you can give to the twin husks in Roundtable Hold and thus be able to purchase the tier 1 and tier 2 stones indefinitely.
This, of course, is a real demonstration of the trickiness of open-world design. I keep wondering if there are things in the early Limgrave area (oh, and I woke up this morning realizing how straightforward that name is - the game literally starts with one of Godrick's minions taking us, a Tarnished, to Limgrave, where he kills Tarnished and uses their limbs. Limb-Grave) that I have yet to discover.
One thing I'm a little surprised by is how few weapons I've found after quite a few hours of play. I guess that in part, because it's so easy to swap out Ashes of War and change the stat-scaling on your weapons, there's less of a need for so many. Of course, as a caster, I only have the stats for my starting sword and a couple of daggers.
Naturally, this is making me feel like I should play my Confessor, who is going to be a melee/faith hybrid build. While I originally planned to go Strength-based, I found the Flail at the little camp where you get your first map fragment, and realized it has an 18 Dexterity minimum - so when I go back to that character I'm going to get him at least up to that (it seems to have scaling with both Dexterity and Strength - but I supposed I could swap out Ashes of War if I wanted to go Strength-based).
One thing I've been trying to find is more of the gravity-sorcery magic that I saw previewed. It occurs to me, however, that given that I've been going around Liurnia (where the Academy of Raya Lucaria is - one of the legacy dungeons, I assume,) I'd likely be finding more traditional Glintstone sorcery, and that I should instead go east to the regions where General Redahn (conqueror of the stars or whatever he's called) hangs out - this is where I got my Meteorite Staff, after all (which can't get upgraded but starts with S-tier Intelligence scaling).
All the Soulsborne games are pretty dense. It might be that the community just hasn't had the chance to put all the pieces together yet, but Elden Ring feels a bit dizzying in terms of how much there is to do. Still, I've never felt really stuck, in large part thanks to the fact that I can always go try something else. There's a dragon that guards the key to the Academy that I haven't been able to take down (only getting it to like 75% - it's either resistant to magic damage or intended for much higher-level players) though I just read online that you can actually get the key by sneaking past the dragon instead of fighting it.
Limgrave is a sort of deceptively normal-looking region with green grass and blue skies. While Liurnia is still fairly "real-world" like, when I've gone to the east to a place I think is called Caelid (I don't have the map fragments to be sure,) the look is very different - red skies and a scorched earth.
I still feel like I'm running out of FP pretty regularly - I haven't quite figured out what the ultimate "damage-to-FP efficient" spell is, or if I just need to level up the Mind stat some more (the equivalent of Dark Souls' Attunement - though I think that it's separate from the items that increase how many spells you can pick up).
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